As one of the most polarizing main event superstars WWE has produced in recent history, Roman Reigns is no stranger to the steady mix of boos and cheers he receives on a nightly basis.
Reigns, 32, whose real name is Leati "Joe" Anoa'i, is past the point where the crowd's reaction will bother him or threaten to get him off his game -- especially after a run of headlining the last three WrestleMania cards and three times wearing the WWE championship.
As Reigns enters Sunday's "dream match" against John Cena at No Mercy in Los Angeles (8 p.m. ET, WWE Network), he credits self belief and hard work for keeping him grounded amid regular storms of criticism. As long as the fans are making noise in some manner -- whether negative or positive -- he knows that he has done his job.
"I know the time I put in. I know the sweat, the blood -- even the tears," Reigns told CBS Sports during an appearance this week on the "In This Corner" podcast. "I've cried over this stuff. As a grown man, I've cried over wrestling before. I'm man enough to say it. But it means that much to me and I think that's why, especially my family, that's why we're so good at it because we really care about it. And that's something we can connect to.
"It's just, if you don't have confidence in yourself, it's going to be a terrible time when you walk through that curtain."
Pressed for the last time wrestling caused him to cry, Reigns took a second to pause and contemplate. He briefly mentioned his April victory in the main event of WrestleMania 33, which sent the iconic Undertaker into expected retirement.
"It wasn't a 'cry,' like there were no tears after the Taker match, but I could feel it inside," Reigns said. "There was an extreme amount of joy and excitement to be in that position, but it was really heavy to where it made me feel that type of emotion. There weren't any tears or anything like that."
If you want the real story about the last time pro wrestling caused Reigns to shed a tear, you need to go back to Florida Championship Wrestling (FCW), the precursor developmental territory for what became NXT. The year was 2011 and Reigns, just 26, wasn't so far removed from a failed run as a professional football player in the CFL after a standout career at Georgia Tech.
Reigns was treated to a late-night dinner by his real-life cousin, Jey Uso, who was in the midst of a breakthrough stretch on the main roster alongside twin brother Jimmy as The Usos. Reigns, born three months earlier, grew up considering the twins, whose real names are Jonathan and Joshua Fatu, as actual brothers.
It was a time in Reigns life where he was struggling, not just financially, but as an aspiring wrestler hoping to make his own name in the family business (his father Sika and brother Rosie were WWE alums).
"We were just kind of talking and stuff and he just laid it out there," Reigns said. "He put me in a situation. He was like, 'If you're about to win this and that, what would you do?' And I had no clue what I would do because I was just so green. He was trying to get me to think on my feet. He may have said something that just kind of irritated me about the whole situation because I just wasn't ready and I knew that."
Asked to essentially book his own path to the FCW heavyweight championship and pressed for exact details about what that would look like and what would happen next, Reigns admits to getting emotional right there in the restaurant as the pressure overwhelmed him.
"I just wasn't on that level with him, and it kind of broke me down because I felt like I wasn't going to learn fast enough and become what I should be and what my family needed me to be," Reigns said. "I think the pressure and just the emotion of that made me crack that night.
"I didn't know what to do and it was so frustrating because I wanted to be the best. I want to be the absolute greatest to do that, and I had that mindset since Day 1. Like anybody who is attached to anything or has a deep passion for it, it can strike those nerves and that night it did."
The moment Reigns first knew he was good enough to accomplish his own dreams came the following year on NXT. Months before his main roster call-up as a member of The Shield, Reigns was wrestling in an NXT house show at the Jacksonville Armory in Florida against C.J. Parker (who know wrestles in New-Japan Pro Wrestling as Juice Robinson).
"It was actually a nice little turnout with a couple of hundred people and the crowd just got with it," Reigns said. "It was almost like how the crowd is with me right now with dueling chants. That was all happening in this tiny little armory, and we had just this incredible match. I don't know if it was incredible under today's standards for what I'm doing but in that moment it felt like we were just tearing it up."
Feeling confident form the match he just produced, Reigns walked back through the curtain and locked eyes with Seth Rollins, who had been watching the match.
"He was really tight with Juice, and I could see it in his eyes that he had just seen both of us kind of taste it for the first time," Reigns said. "We could kind of understand it for the first time and we knew that we were a little further along. That's when I kind of knew like, 'OK, this is the snowball effect. We just got to let it roll and keep learning and now just get better and better because now we have a foundation.'"
